Recently, virtual or digital wallets have started taking the place of physical credit and debit cards in performing cashless transactions. Virtual wallets store personal details of the owner of the virtual wallet, and details of payment vehicles for use in transactions. Accordingly, virtual wallets can be used to purchase items in-store or online, e.g. using a computer or smartphone and to authenticate the user's credentials. For example, the virtual wallet can verify the age of the user for a purchase of alcohol.
Current virtual wallets face certain drawbacks when integrating with a merchant's payment terminal. One drawback is that virtual wallets are required to provide sensitive personal information, for example a permanent account number of the user or payment vehicle identifier (e.g. credit or debit card number or account number) of a payment vehicle (e.g. credit or debit card, or bank account), to the merchant during an electronic payment transaction. Merchants may not want to handle such sensitive information which may otherwise add burden to the merchant due to the cost of compliance with standards for receiving that information. The specified payment gateways of the merchant may also be difficult to integrate with the virtual wallet.
Another shortcoming of current virtual wallets is that the process for onboarding (i.e. registering) new merchants can be tedious. The variety of shopping cart plug-ins used by different merchants also pose a problem when integrating with current virtual wallets.
A need therefore exists to provide a method and system for making an electronic payment transaction that seeks to address at least some of the above problems.